Drake Creative

The Art Effect is the merger of two long-standing art nonprofits in the Hudson Valley, each with its own visionary founder. When we started talking about an identity system for the new organization, that played heavily into how we approached it. We didn’t want either becoming the dominant partner in a merger of equals. We also didn’t want any kind of logo that locked a dynamic new arts organization into something static.

In working with various creative leaders there, including Todd Poteet, Kyle Bahl, Mary Ellen Iatropoulos, and executive director Nicole Fenichel-Hewitt, we went worked through rapid prototypes, creating a room of bad sketches and post it notes on the wall, trying to figure out how to break out of the typical logo box.

Oddly in this case, that’s how we came up with the logo box. Because it’s not a box, it’s frame that shows is the creativity of the people who come through this organization. They’re the ones who make it. They’re what you can see. And that is The Art Effect: an organization that teaches youth the power of creative thought and how that is applied to the arts, but also how it applies to our lives so they can become creative problem solvers and a generation that turns dreams into the real world.